Guthrie Woody: Na putu do slave - autobiografija

Woody Guthrie: On the Road to Fame-Autobiography

Woody Guthrie was one of the greatest and most influential singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music. It would be difficult to list all the musicians he influenced and who pointed him out as a role model: from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, through Bruce Springsteen, to Steve Earle, Billy Bragg or Bob Geldof and Joe Strummer, to name just a few.
He was the first protest singer, and his songs and the guitar that said "This machine kills fascists" made him a spokesperson for the oppressed and the poor, but at the same time he also sang about the beauty of America that he observed through open doors or from the roof of freight cars on his travels up and across the country. When the police took him off the train, he would take the open road on, on foot or hitchhike, in search of fortune, "on the road to fame," bohemianly stopping where his heart drew him or his empty stomach compelled him. He was a true "king of the street" - wherever he got, he would throw his hat on the ground and sing for a tip...
Sam Woody writes of his wanderings:
"I put my hat on my head and started walking west of Redding through redwood forests and along the coast, wandering from town to town with a guitar slung over my shoulder and singing in the shade of forty-two states: on Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City... for the unemployed and flea-bitten tramps in makeshift settlements on the edge of your city, maybe. I've sung on the East Coast gravel barges and on New York's Bowery Street, where I've watched the police chase drunks... I've meandered along the Gulf of Mexico and sang with sailors and sea wolves in Texas, with marijuana smokers in cheap lodges in Houston all over Northern California...followed the apricot and peach harvests around Marysville and the sandhills around Auburn, where I drank good homemade wine from the jugs of kind winegrowers...
Sometimes I got lucky, and I would get some good work. I sang live on the radio in Los Angeles...people heard me on CBS and NBC national radio, and thought I was rich and famous, and I didn't have a dime when I started again a difficult path..."
After more than 60 years since the publication of Guthrie's autobiography in America (more precisely, it was in 1943), Šareni dučan proudly publishes the first Croatian edition, illustrated with the author's drawings, thus snatching another exceptional book from oblivion. A must-read for every true music lover!